RowJimmy Well, that actually gives me a few indices with which I can try to explain my position. I'm a Deleuze nerd, so along those lines I could outline my views like this:
- There is a will of any Ukrainian people that is said to exist.
- The logic or self-expression or internally affirmed "social contract" of such a people is not completely sufficient for or consistent with this will.
- Nothing expressible about the conditions of this will (eg this theory of it) is completely sufficient for or consistent with this will either.
- The territorial boundaries said to be "of Ukraine" are not exact with respect to the people or their will.
- Nor are the categorical boundaries said to be "of Ukraine" (eg "absolutely distinct from Russia and Russians").
- Nor are the objects said to be "of Ukrainian sovereignty" (eg accession to NATO).
All a bit bullshit in a sense, it's the same old post-structuralist critique that says "there is a will of the people but we can't talk about it completely or consistently". But this critique does does allow us to give attention to the flaws of both the national and international discourses about Ukraine.
The national discourses have contested the erasure of a very real Russian-ness of some people said to be Ukrainian. This has included all sorts of issues, including separatist war, the option of linguistic erasure, the conditions of Soviet history, border-drawing, population movements, the Holodomor, religious history, etcetera.
The international discourses have contested claims about the determinations and necessities of Ukraine with respect to other nations—eg the United States caused Euromaidan, eg Russia had full control of Yanukovych, eg there was no spontaneous separatism in the Donbass only subverted Russian contras, eg Ukrainian sovereignty is defined by accession to NATO or the EU, etcetera. And these questions have long historical roots too, which rise from the breakup of the USSR, the historical stakes of Ukrainian independence from the collapsing USSR and Ukraine's nuclear disarmament, claims and counter-claims and grievances about what the United States did or did not agree or recommend about the expansion of NATO in the past, post-Soviet Russia's history of interfering with sovereignty in Georgia, Chechnya, and more.
These discourses also evidently overlap, are found together, and depend on each other's terms. The speakers of these discourses are locked in a murderous combat for conceptual territory that lacks a final determining ground.
You end up with a situation where the contest of national discourses is said to "deliberate" on various premises or clauses of the "real people of Ukraine" and the "will of the people", and the contest of international discourses on premises of "the question of Ukraine": premises about who caused the war, which nations are evil and which are good, whether Ukraine is a part of Europe, whether Ukraine truly differs from Russia, whether Ukraine needs to be de-nazified or was full of fascists in history, etcetera.
No grouping drawn from these premises sufficiently expresses the conditions of the life or will of the Ukrainian people, and there are some rather obvious fault-lines along which this infidelity makes itself plain to each of us in different ways. These are pretty much what we've argued about in this thread for years.
My view, especially as an outsider, is that it's an ethical necessity to attend to the (often neglected) factors that open up these fault-lines if we're to care for the lives of people that depend for their freedom on the realisation of what incomplete things we're able to say are the conditions of possibility for the "will of the people of Ukraine".
